Sunday, 11 May 2014

Crossing Borders

I was talking last night with someone who was for 28 years a
magistrate in England. ‘People need Borders’ he said. He started with the
example of a child who has to be stopped from throwing (or has to learn not to
throw) his dinner on the floor, but he thinks adults need such borders too. (I
hope and believe I’m not misrepresenting his views.)

I agree with him. Freedom is as heady a drug as LSD, and
more of it than one can handle — or, which comes to the same thing, the removal
of too many borders — can make one very ill. It gives one existential angst,
which may sound airy-fairy but is in fact something everyone suffers from time
to time, though they may not know that name for it: it’s that desperate
bewilderment, that panicky feeling of ‘I don’t know where I am’, or it’s like
being in a lift and the cable snaps.

The question is — A question
is — what sort of borders, and who sets them? He thinks the borders are legal:
cross them, and the authorities will punish you. I think they’re moral: cross
them, and you will be in a state of sin. (You don’t have to be religious to
experience, even if you don’t understand, the state of sin.) Quite probably the
original basis of many legal systems is a set of moral imperatives, but in
practice the legal and the moral all too often conflict: one must choose
between doing what one believes to be right and what someone else says is
legal. I hope I would always choose the former.

To look at it another way: I think that if, in a moment of
rage, I ‘see red’ and hit someone, then that is certainly not justifiable, but
it is human, understandable, and forgivable. But if I hit someone (or imprison him) because I say
he has done wrong and I am punishing him for it, that is inhuman and
unforgivable. If I have understood him properly, my magistrate friend believes
almost exactly the opposite.